Friday, 29 January 2016

In this week's blog, we welcome LHSA's new Project Cataloguing Archivist, Aline Brodin...

My name is Aline Brodin and I am very pleased to be back at LHSA to work on the project “Cataloguing Norman Dott's neurosurgical case notes (1920-1960)” until the end of July 2016. Indeed, I have started working as Project Cataloguing Archivist at LHSA on Monday 25th January, but I am already familiar with both LHSA and the Norman Dott project since I did a 10-week CRC internship from April to June 2015, during which I catalogued the Norman Dott case notes. This very enriching experience enabled me to develop my cataloguing skills and to gain good knowledge of the historical and administrative context of the project.

Aline working on a case note.

I trust that these cataloguing skills will enable me to see my task through to completion, all the more so that thanks to this internship I am already familiar with the content of the case notes themselves, including their specialised medical jargon and very technical documents. However, my objectives as an intern and my objectives as a project cataloguing archivist are somewhat different. Indeed, although my time during the internship was mainly focused on the Norman Dott project, my supervisors Ruth Honeybone and Louise Williams made sure I acquired lots of experience in a wide range of archival activities to help my future career. But this cataloguing post is in a way more challenging and is entirely focused on cataloguing the Norman Dott case notes: indeed, the project is coming to an end and the deadline is rapidly approaching. Thus, I have six months to finish cataloguing between 3267 (low estimate) and 4267 (high estimate) case notes, which represents an average of 35 per day. Case notes can be more or less detailed: some relate to cases spanning on several years and contain all kinds of handwritten notes, reports, charts, letters, photographs etc., while others can consist in a typed case summary of one single page. For each case note, I record carefully selected information that I then enter into the XML editor oXygen to create, eventually, an online catalogue. The recorded information is designed to be useful for future researchers whilst protecting patient confidentiality.

During my
internship, I was cataloguing the Bangour series, that is to say the case notes
from the Brain Injuries Unit in Bangour General Emergency Service Hospital in
Broxburn, dating from c. 1939-c. 1945, in the midst of the Second World War.
This time, I will be cataloguing the series LHB1 CC/24 and LHB1 CC/22. LHB1
CC/24 covers Dott’s work at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh between c. 1941
and c. 1959, whereas LHB1 CC/22 covers case notes from various stages in Dott’s
career that have been filed by the condition of the patient and that date from
c. 1925 to c. 1955. The differences between the Bangour series and the ones I
am cataloguing now are not very substantial; the most noticeable change would
be that in the Bangour series the patients are mostly soldiers or military
auxiliaries, whereas in the R.I.E series they are almost exclusively civilians.
Therefore, not only are there much more women and children, but there also are
more “everyday life” accidents: for example, head injuries tend to be more the
results of car accidents and kids bickering rather than gunshots or explosions…
But in both cases, the case notes give a very interesting insight into a period
and into people’s lives.

The Norman Dott project is a large-scale project that has involved many people over the years and that will greatly help to make LHSA collections visible and accessible; this is why I am very excited to take up the challenge to finish cataloguing this great collection, this time not as intern but as a project cataloguing archivist.

Thursday, 21 January 2016

In this week's blog, we welcome LHSA's new Access Officer, Alice Doyle...

My name is Alice Doyle and I’m
just coming to the end of my first week here in the brand new role of Access
Officer.

I’m originally from Suffolk on
the south-east coast of England, and first came to Scotland in 2008 to study
Classical Civilisation at the University of Glasgow. I suffered my first bout
of ‘archive fever’ when I worked as a volunteer researcher for Ipswich Museum’s
Ipswich at War exhibition, and I
absolutely loved poring over registers of evacuees and tracing their subsequent
movements across Suffolk. I was fascinated by how aspects of an individual’s
life can find their way onto the pages of a dusty tome, and in how many ways
this collected information can consequently illuminate our views of society past
and present. During my undergraduate degree I secured a brief placement with the
University of Glasgow Archive Services, which introduced me to the basic tenets
of archival practice. I knew then that the bug had well and truly bitten me,
and in November 2015 I completed an MSc in Information Management and
Preservation.

Alice hard at work...

My first week has involved trying
not to get lost in the maze of corridors, getting an insight into what everyone
does and how the services fit together, and trying desperately to remember lots
of names! I’ve also had an introduction to the stores and collections, and on
Wednesday I had the chance to help Louise set up a session for some History
undergraduates. This was to familiarise them with the basics of archival
research and how primary sources can be used. After a bit of guidance on how to
handle archival items, Louise introduced the students to four different types
of material that can shine a light on perceptions of insanity in the Victorian
age: letters written by patients at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum; the Morningside Mirror, which contains
articles compiled and published by patients and staff; a book of press
cuttings, often compiled by staff, of articles relating to the treatment and
attitudes surrounding mental health; and patient certification papers, which
give us an insight into how an individual could come to be admitted into the
asylum.

This session also brought home
how varied the items in the collections are, and how personal some of them can
be. A particular favourite of mine was this letter written by a patient to a
woman ‘on the outside’, in which he apologises for promising to marry her, and
for dancing at a ball “as my dancing may have hurt you”. Cognizant of his
illness, he acknowledges that his promise was a delusion but affirms his love
for her as “no delusion, (it is truth I love you)”. This human aspect to
archival work reminds us that - while they may seem like one among many - each
name on the lists of admitted patients represents an important and very personal
moment in these individuals’ lives.

Letter from Royal Edinburgh Hospital Casebook (LHB7/51/52 p. 169)

I’m incredibly grateful for all
the support and guidance I’ve received from the staff here in LHSA and in the
wider Centre for Research Collections teams, and I’m looking forward to
learning more about how I can help to increase user access to and awareness of
the fascinating collections held here, whether that’s through responding to
enquiries, conducting archival research or helping out with organising
engagement and outreach activities.

Friday, 15 January 2016

As the old year passes and the new one comes in, we’ve a
host of behind-the-scenes tasks to complete here at LHSA. It’s a bit of a
frantic welcoming-in to each January, but it’s vital if we’re to be in good
shape for the year ahead.

One of these tasks is to check up on the new items that we
have taken in over the last twelve months. We call these new additions to the
archive ‘accessions’ and we can take them in in two ways, which reflects how
our material is organised. Since we’re the archive for NHS Lothian and all our
holdings are owned by them, the first way we take things in is by direct
transfer from the health service. This could be from individual hospitals or
from NHS administration. For example, in April 2015 we received a wonderful accession
from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children (REHSC), including late nineteenth-century
nurse training records (and this less-than-glowing report!):

Since LHSA collects more general material that can help us
understand the history of health in Edinburgh and the Lothians, we also receive
gifts from non-NHS organisations and private individuals. We take in gifts of nursing
and midwifery badges from Edinburgh-trained nurses quite often, as we did this year:

Central Midwives Board for Scotland badge, c. 1950s (from Acc15/004)

Every new collection that reaches us has its own story:
sometimes, a hospital building is closing and staff contact us with important
records that reflect that institution’s history – as has happened
with the imminent transfer of REHSC services
from their current site in Sciennes Road to Little France. This year, we hope
to work more closely with our NHS colleagues in order to identify material
that, once transferred to us, can make the archive bigger and better for the future.

In other cases, we can be contacted by individuals or organisations
from our area who may have papers relevant to the understanding of the history
of medicine. For example, last year we added to our papers from neurologist
Ernst Levin with some more personal material about the medic’s life. Levin was
born in 1887 in Berlin, but left Germany in 1933 (he then practised in Munich)
after the rise of the National Socialists. Levin then worked with Edinburgh
neurosurgeon Norman Dott and in the Western General Hospital. Our new accession
covers most phases of his life, amongst the most fascinating of which are his
own photographs from German First World War trenches where he served as an assistant
surgeon:

Photographs from the German lines, c. 1915 (from Acc15/001)

I’ll be saying more about these images in the Centre for
Research Collections blog, Untold Stories, later this year.

However, it’s important that archives are not just passive
recipients of donations, but also seek out new additions to collections lest
unique histories are lost. Dr Mike Barfoot, one of LHSA’s previous archivists,
saw this very clearly, especially in the chance to collect material about
Edinburgh’s fight against HIV. The combined efforts of the NHS, council bodies,
charities, police and voluntary groups in our region to combat the spread of
the virus and care for those affected had no precedent before or since (a fact
which has been brought home to me by speaking to those involved in early
patient care and HIV prevention). In collecting materials from individuals and
organisations before they were lost, Mike saw a chance to build an unrivalled
set of resources for future researchers.

The determination to collect did not end when Mike retired,
but was carried on by his successor, Laura Gould (who worked towards eleven of
our HIV/AIDS collections being recognised by UNESCO in 2011) – and I hope that
I can carry on this tradition of active collecting in my time here.

This year has been no exception, and some of my favourite
collections record the history of Edinburgh’s services to combat HIV. Firstly,
we’ve been creating archives ourselves in the form of oral histories – part of
a programme of recordings which I hope to add to as 2016 goes on. This effort
was admirably started by Iain Phillips who was with us through a
secondment from John Lewis’ Golden Jubilee Trust programme – but since Iain’s
secondment was completed, I’ve been having a go myself! I started by speaking
to Lothian Regional Council HIV Team education workers, John Young and Kerstin
Phillips who started a pioneering educational programme in secondary schools by
training young workers to pass on their first-hand experiences of relationships
and HIV. Kerstin was kind enough to donate some material used during her work
in the 1990s, including books aimed towards children living in families
affected by the virus:

Children's book explaining a parent's visits to the clinic, 1998 (from Acc15/028)

This year, we’ve also received ten panels made for the Edinburgh
Names Project at HIV and Hepatitis C charity, Waverley Care – these are textile
collages meant to be put together as part of a large quilt to act as a memorial
to those lost through AIDS-related illnesses.

As we move into 2016, I’m already preparing to receive our
first accession of the year. We never know what we are going to be contacted
about next, but I’m sure that there will be more than a few surprises to bring
to you. If you want to see what new material we've taken in over the last few years, you can find us on The National Archives' lists of accessions to repositories (where LHSA accessions from 2015 will soon be up to view).

Friday, 8 January 2016

It’s the first blog of the year, and a chance to reflect
back on some of our achievements of 2015: projects completed – cataloguing and
conserving our HIV/AIDS collections, and a website full of educational
resources based on them (http://hiv-aids-resources.is.ed.ac.uk/)
– and a brand new Wellcome Trust-funded TB case note cataloguing project began.
We started converting our catalogues to make our collections available in
ArchivesSpace (the University’s new online archive discovery tool), hosted a
John Lewis Golden Jubilee Trust secondee, worked to preserve our regularly used
bound volumes and architectural plans, and answered a wide range of your
enquiries relating to the material we look after. All of this and more has
featured in the blogs of the last 12 months…

But we’ve got 2016 to look forward to now, and lots in store
for us already. As well as our usual work helping others to access the LHSA
collections, we’ll be collaborating with our NHS archivist colleagues across Scotland
to organise a one-day symposium looking at the benefits of using archive material
in art projects (and taking part in a couple of art projects ourselves for the
redevelopment of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital and the new buildings at the
Little France Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh site). We’ll also be showcasing a
couple of our recent Wellcome Trust projects in an exhibition in the Main
Library display wall later in the year, which will coincide with the completion
of our Wellcome project to catalogue Norman Dott’s case notes that started back in 2012.

We’re delighted to be taking part in the University’s
Innovative Learning Week (ILW) in February where we have secured some funding
from the ILW programme to create resources from archive material to entertain
and educate 11 to 14 year olds in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children.
And we’ll be working with colleagues from the Hospital to make sure those
resources are just right!

The rest of January is a particularly exciting time for us
as we welcome two new members of staff. The first is a maternity cover post, to
continue (and complete) the Dott case note cataloguing and the second is our
Access Officer, who will focus on LHSA's user services work. More from both of
them once they join us later this month, so watch this space!

Lothian Health Services Archive holds the historically important local records of NHS hospitals and other health-related material.
We collect, preserve and catalogue these records and promote them to increase understanding of the history of health and for the benefit of all.

Use of images from LHSA collections

We can provide images from items in our collections, subject to various conditions. Images are provided for private study or non-commercial research, and cannot be used for other purposes unless you request and receive written permission from LHSA to do so.

If you wish to use any images that have been featured on this blog, please contact us at lhsa@ed.ac.uk and we will be happy to discuss permissions with you.